Weekend Reading: Southern Madagascar, Death in New Orleans, Another Tsarnaev Murder?

“Southern Madagascar is a land awash in superstition—of witches and reincarnation and haunted bridges where children leap out of the darkness to send cars careening into the abyss,” begins “A Plague of Sapphires,” on the travel Web site Road & Kingdoms. The journalist Aaron Ross visits Ilakaka, a gemstone-mining boomtown that Burkhard Bilger wrote about in the magazine, in 2006. But now the sapphires that summoned local bandits and international dealers are running low, and a coup and protectionist economic policies have crippled the industry. “I can always go somewhere else if there are stones,” a security guard tells Ross. “But I will return here because it’s home.”

Readers following the saga of Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto—controversially identified by Newsweek as the inventor of Bitcoin, a claim that Nakamoto now denies—might enjoy James Ryerson’s “The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician,” published in 2001 by Lingua Franca. (Or consider, from this magazine, Joshua Davis’s “The Crypto-Currency,” about the hunt for Bitcoin’s founder.) Rather than circulating a digital currency, the shadowy character of the piece’s title, A. M. Monius, has written a metaphysical treatise, “Coming to Understanding,” and has paid prominent philosophers twelve thousand dollars each to review it. Ryerson sets out to unmask Monius, writing, “It’s not every day that you find yourself scripted into a Thomas Pynchon novel.” Ultimately, he succeeds.

In the latest issue of Boston Magazine, Susan Zalkind investigates “the murders before the marathon”—the 2011 triple homicide in Waltham, Massachusetts, that allegedly involved the Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev. The murders remained unsolved, at least in part because Tsarnaev’s alleged accomplice, Ibragim Todashev, was shot and killed by an F.B.I. agent when he was said to be on the brink of confessing. Zalkind’s narrative is set apart by her access to a nineteen-year-old named Tatiana Gruzdeva—Todashev’s former girlfriend—and by her friendship with one of the victims. She writes, “In the back of my mind is this question: Did her dead boyfriend kill my friend Erik?”

“I Left My Leg in St. Roch Cemetery,” one of a series of New Orleans-themed pieces published during Mardi Gras week by the “slow journalism” site Narratively, takes a gentler approach to the subject of death. “Slow” is the right description, in a good way, for this meditative article by Eve Troeh, about a tiny chapel and its unofficial caretaker. (Visitors leave behind plaster replicas of limbs and organs that correspond to their particular ailments.) “Life in a cemetery is really welcome,” the caretaker says, perhaps because his city welcomes the cemetery as others might not. At one point, a woman tells Troeh about a funeral procession for a retired postal worker:

“His wife … ” she pauses, choked up. Another swallow. “When they pushed the casket in, this is what she said: ‘That’s all I can do for you, honey.’ And she turned around in her black high heels and her black dress and she danced out of the cemetery. That’s how we do death in New Orleans.”